Theseus

Video games had been a good escape. I needed them both after the encounter with Skygraves and the certain coming storm that he would bring upon me. This game was built for humans pretending to be capable of performing a ship core’s job, not to be realistic simulations that needed to be managed as such, and Agatha had apparently played the game enough to know how to take advantage of the nuances of the game’s systems that didn’t accurately portray reality. The difficulty gap between the most challenging solo scenarios and facing an actual human opponent was a truly massive chasm, it would seem, and she stood at the far end of that chasm. I didn’t stand a chance.

Once or twice, I caught her off guard, and she went off in the in-game text chat, asking how I did something, or whining that what I was doing was an exploit. It seems we’d both stumbled onto tricks that the other hadn’t at some point. But most of the time, she was dropping me hints on how I could handle a skirmish that I’d lost better. They were always things that I found annoying about the system, things that were inaccurate to the reality of starship control or deliberate gamification of the battles. I doubted any of it would be useful knowledge to take back to my real training in the sims, but that didn’t really matter that night. This was just for fun.

We played for several hours, but eventually her flesh called her to bed as well. She asked if I wanted to meet up to play again the next night, and I enthusiastically agreed. It broke my heart knowing I couldn’t tell her that we didn’t plan on being on the local network anymore by this time tomorrow.

I spent some time adding farewell messages to my script for launching the ship, so that I could apologize for our rapid departure to my new friends. Dr. Fuller, Dr. Reese, Dr. Yates, and Agatha all deserved to know that we didn’t just abscond with a bunch of the station’s extra supplies on a whim. I made sure to tell them about our little shadow war with Skygraves so that they at least knew our side of whatever spin Skygraves would surely put on the story for the public. I couldn’t tell them where we were going or how long it would be until I could hit them up at the next relay, but I could let them know that it’d be awhile and I’d shoot them a message when I could. They’d all get their messages the moment we left, and that would likely be the last they’d hear from us until we’d landed on Io. That’s only if we could safely use their relay too.

Joel made his way out and then returned fairly quickly, something that looked like a thick bolt of fabric tucked under his arm. Once he was safely inside, he let the cloth slip away to reveal a long steel box. He presented it to Ray directly, who opened it to reveal a staggering number of the familiar vials of stabilizer that I’d seen her administer to herself a number of times by now. She was shocked to see so much of it in one place, and after counting it up, declared that between her internal distribution system and if she didn’t stay awake more than she needed to, she could probably make the supply last almost five months. I really hoped she wouldn’t need to hibernate for that long through this ordeal, though.

Maybe after we laid low on Io for awhile, Foundation would just give up on me. Even if I was the kind of asset that would make them want to push a hostile force into the inner colonies the way that they did, they’d have to give up after a few months if we didn’t leave them any clues to follow, right? They’d return their forces and write me off. We’d slip back around, and we’d get back to doing pirate contracts for cash on Luna, like we’d planned to do in the first place. I’d just have to keep quiet about what I am; pretend I’m just an enthusiastic hacker who went all out on cybernetics when I’m on the colony. We’d find work to help people again. No more crazy conspiracies, at least for awhile.

I think most of the crew went to sleep, eventually. I couldn’t speak for Joel and Aisling, since they both shut off the sensors in their rooms at night, something that only currently upset me because I also couldn’t see into the mess hall. That left a contiguous gap in my awareness in the middle of the ship, large enough that it felt mildly distressing. But I knew they didn’t leave their rooms.

The only exceptions were Mouse and Doc. As promised, they stayed awake the whole night. Mouse did most of the work, mostly directing Doc to chores that required little strength or expertise. If Mouse had to stop working to help Doc figure out how to do something, then it was counterproductive. Despite his obvious exhaustion, he worked tirelessly through the night. I wasn’t sure how much of that was just youthful stubbornness and how much was his mechanical arms, but he certainly didn’t complain about his tired eyes more than rubbing at them on occasion.

I spent a good amount of the night in torpor, enjoying the peace and quiet of my void. Like sleep without the strain of reading the data stream, just staring peacefully into the lights and thinking slow thoughts of the coming day. By our contract, it wasn’t supposed to be the last meeting with scientists who wanted to examine me, but out of necessity, it would be.

—

The following morning was surprisingly uneventful. I stumbled my way out of my core module, shivering and vomiting and terribly sensitive as usual, and within an hour, I felt human enough to prepare for the day. We had a tense breakfast. It was probably some of the last fresh food we’d have for quite some time. I savored as much of it as I could before my nervous stomach decided that I couldn’t possibly stand to have anything else in my gut. And then Aisling and I stood together at the end of the cargo bay.

It was almost complete now. It was decidedly not a cargo bay door, the entrance much smaller, more like one of the bulwarks between internal sections of Theseus than anything that could acceptably fit cargo loading machines through. But all it needed was a door bolted into place, and it would supposedly be a closed space able to contain the pressure we needed to survive inside. That’s all we needed for now.

I stared at Aisling next to me as she did the last of her prep. She looked like she was going to war rather than acting as escort, which I suppose is what was happening. She had on her tactical vest I remember her using in the manhunt where we captured Shaw, with her array of six loaded pistols strapped into place across her chest. She had her custom pistol in a holster at her waist, and I’m pretty sure she had more guns hidden somewhere in her clothes. I suppose that was the advantage of preferring a smaller caliber of weapon than the others: she could certainly carry a lot of them.

If I didn’t know that at some point during our day, this would stop being a simple bodyguard job, I’d say she was being paranoid. Instead, I wondered if she might want to try to hide more of them on my person.

“We’ll be fine, Meryll.” Aisling spoke as she drew and checked the clips of each of her pistols in turn. She must have been able to tell that my nerves were getting to me.

“Has he tried to message you or anything? Or has anyone from the colony sent you anything?” I asked, wondering if there might be some minute chance to stall out the violence one more day to buy us time to sneak off without things turning to a fight.

“Not a peep. He’s done talking. Shaw, Joel, and Ray are off on their own escapades already. Doc and Mouse are armed just in case his men are stupid enough to attack here. We’ll be on the other side of the station, making friends with yet another person with a title in front of their name. Dr. Ido, right?” She chambered the last of her firearms and slipped it back into her vest, feeling up the spare clips at the bottom layer of the vest to be certain they were loaded as well.

“Yeah, biologist.” I nodded “Messages haven’t been very friendly, but they’ve at least been professional.” I hadn’t really been able to get a read on this researcher electronically, which made me nervous after the disaster that was Dr. Godin. But she hadn’t really set off any red flags either, so I wasn’t certain if I should jump to any conclusions. I knew Aisling wasn’t going to let her do anything inappropriate, though.

I was very nervous as I stepped through the hangar bay doors, expecting to see an even more inflated group of idle gunners standing guard in the intermediary hallway, or someone barring entrance to the colony entirely, if Skygraves had decided that he wanted to corral us all into one place. But there was nobody there at all. That didn’t make me feel any more at ease. At least I didn’t feel his bizarre electromagnetic presence, though.

Stepping into the colony felt wrong. Like we were invading directly into enemy territory, and we’d soon be cut down for our audacity. The halls had the typical light bustle of people going about their day like normal, but it still somehow felt off. This wasn’t a safe public place anymore. There was a war brewing beneath the surface that only we were aware of.

I took a deep breath as I stepped into the colony proper, and Aisling put a hand on my shoulder, giving me a reassuring smile before she drew her custom handgun, keeping it at the ready as we walked.

Dr. Ido’s lab was clear on the other side of the colony. It was the longest walk I would have from the hangar since I started this work. I hated it. It meant that I would be long out of Theseus’s psionic network range. I couldn’t watch the ship remotely.

I think most of the civilians were becoming accustomed to seeing me wandering the halls of the colony with an armed bodyguard. They knew well enough to leave me be and my guard wouldn’t have a reason to use their guns. Maybe it was Aisling or just the fact that we were so on edge, but we must have been emitting a particularly intense aura because people kept an even wider berth today. I didn’t mind in the least.

“I don’t like this.” I told Aisling as I glanced nervously around the halls, like there was some kind of predator waiting in the wings for us to slip up and take advantage of our distraction. “Something should have happened by now, right?”

“Mmm.” Was all Aisling said at first, her own head on a swivel. “I haven’t left the ship much this week. Is it normally this… quiet?”

“Yeah. This place is way bigger than it needs to be for the amount of people that live here.” I explained. I hadn’t thought about it, but she had basically spent our entire stay on Venus either negotiating with people from the ship or in the port authority’s office. “It just looks empty cause this place was made for a bigger population.”

“Maybe I should’ve gotten a feel for it.” She mumbled. After a few moments of silent walking, she asked “You ready to get shot at?”

“Guess so.” I swallowed. I wasn’t even really sure what else I was supposed to say. Despite being much smaller than it, I was not nearly as maneuverable as Theseus in the flesh, and I didn’t have the vast distances that battles in space had to be able to use that maneuverability between when a shot was fired and when it would connect. If somebody shot a bullet at my fleshy body, I certainly wouldn’t be dodging after the fact like I could in space. I’d just have to lay low and hope Aisling could handle it, I guess.

“Well, you shouldn’t have to be.” She reassured me. I raised an eyebrow and shot her a questioning glare. “Skygraves wants you, and I doubt you’d be anymore useful to him dead than a normal core would be. And you’re unarmed. He’s going to have told his people, specifically, not to shoot you. Probably stressed that real hard to them. You won’t be getting shot today unless someone royally fucks up.”

She made a good point. If it came to a gun fight, I would not be the target at all. I began to wonder what that might mean for our strategy, but we’d made it to our destination before I could make the consideration. So far, no Skygraves, and no armed gunmen. I supposed this appointment was happening after all, then.

—

At first, I didn’t like Dr. Ido. She was cold and bitter toward me, just like Dr. Godin had been. She seemed like she was treating me like an object just like he was, and both Aisling and I were on edge as we discussed the particulars of the work she wanted to do with me. Dr. Ido was an ancient woman, loose wrinkled skin dripping from her face in an unflattering cascade of years spent scowling. I’m pretty sure that she was incapable of any expression besides judgementally frowning, because it was the only face I’d seen her make at either of us. She mumbled at us with a cracking, gravelly voice that made me either think that she’d spent most of her considerable lifetime smoking heavily, or something had more recently gone seriously wrong with her throat. It made it difficult to talk to her, both physically and emotionally.

Ironically, I actually ended up feeling more comfortable with her after we got our greetings out of the way, once I learned that the woman was not being judgemental to me because I’m a machine core. She was just a bitch. She spoke to Aisling with the exact same contempt that she spoke to me, and bafflingly waved Aisling off like she was an annoying child when my captain gave her a thinly-veiled threat. She was a profoundly unlikeable person, but she wasn’t a bigot about me.

Frankly, I have no idea what a biologist would even want with me, and how the samples she took could possibly have been any kind of use to anybody. Blood and tissue samples couldn’t have possibly been that much different from an ordinary human’s, right? But I suppose she was a paying customer, so I didn’t really have much to complain about there. Maybe she was just some crazy old eccentric, or maybe I don’t understand biology as much as an expert in the field.

Either way, it was a relatively quick appointment, and I was glad to be out of there once she let us go with a few bitter grunts, too focused on whatever work she was getting into with my blood to care about our departure. She saw us out of her lab and then slammed the door behind us, locking herself in. And that was the last I ever heard of Dr. Ido.

I rubbed at my lightly bandaged arm. Dr. Ido had only needed to make a single prick near the inside of my elbow and scrape a few samples of my skin cells from my forearm as Aisling led me to a bench, watching our surroundings carefully before sitting down to rest.

“Well that was… an experience.” She mumbled, trying to bring back a bit of casual levity after the social chore that had been speaking with Dr. Ido. “Have all of your clients been this off-putting?”

“They’ve certainly all been that eccentric.” I gave a dry chuckle, sitting down where she directed me. “How are things at the ship? Have they reported in?”

Aisling nodded, an expression of serious concentration building on her face. “I checked before we left. Ship’s ready to go once we’ve got what we need. Mouse said he felt Skygraves, but he didn’t stick around. Joel and Ray went silent, but that’s expected. Shaw’s apparently already done. Things are going to plan.”

“You don’t sound happy about that.” I offered, unsure why she seemed so upset when we might not even need our crazy wild card play after all.

“Things never go to plan.” She grumbled, glancing around the concourse around us like she was trying to spot a hidden figure in the crowd. “Plans aren’t supposed to work. That’s why you plan for plans to use when your plans fail.”

“Here I thought you were just making this up as you went.” I rolled my eyes.

“Improvising is a pretty handy skill to have too when the backup plans also fail.” Aisling gave me the briefest of smirks before she made a more serious observation. “There’s fewer people out.”

I glanced around the massive hall around us. I hadn’t noticed it until she said something, but she was right. The colony felt less busy than I’d come to expect it to be. I could chalk it up to this having been a shorter meeting than what I’d become accustomed to. Perhaps there were just more people still at work right then. But knowing what I knew about Skygraves’ implied threat, it felt ominous. “Yeah, I don’t like it.” I whispered back to her.

“Hmm… fancy dropping in on your therapist?”

“Can’t we just go back to Theseus?” I felt exposed out here, and I still wasn’t entirely certain where Dr. Yates sat with Skygraves. I wanted to trust the man. I even really wanted to have one last session with him about my forgotten trauma. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that the two meeting with each other before I started treatment with him meant something. It was an absurd notion, considering Skygraves couldn’t have possibly known about my desire to see a psychologist on that first day on Venus, but I was now feeling especially paranoid.

“Not until Ray and Joel are done.” Aisling stood back up, motioning for me to follow with her handgun. “But we can’t stay out here in the open while we wait. My guess? He’s gonna know where we are by now. Come on, let’s give him a moving target.”

I shook my head, getting to my feet as ordered “I hate being bait. I hope I never have to be bait again.”

“Someone’s gotta be bait.” She shrugged, patting me on the shoulder again and guiding me a few steps down the hall until I was going at her pace.

It hadn’t dawned on me until that moment, but I hadn’t spent a whole lot of time with our captain before this. I mean, sure, I spent a lot of time looking over her shoulder from the core module, a ghost in my extended body of Theseus as a whole, but my opportunities to spend moments alone with her in the flesh had been surprisingly few, and related to very serious matters.

Not that this wasn’t serious. Skygraves’ threats loomed over us as we walked the halls of his colony. But there was a void in conversation as we walked, with nothing specific for us to focus on. I’m not sure where I found the courage, but I decided to break it to try to get a better read on the captain. “I can’t believe you can keep up with all these games you had to play with Skygraves. Thanks for that, by the way. And sorry for exploding on you before I understood what you were doing.”

She shrugged. My mistaken anger didn’t seem like it weighed on her very much. “I shouldn’t have kept you in the dark, especially knowing you could be watching over my shoulder at any point. I forgot you’re still kinda new to this as well.”

“Hah… yeah, it’s kinda hard to set healthy boundaries for privacy when I can’t help but hack into anything with networking.” I admitted, glancing sheepishly at her “But I mean it, thanks for… all this. I have to admit, when I figured out that I was signing on with a pirate crew of all things, I didn’t expect you would be this… this-”

“Don’t say benevolent. I’m not.” She held a hand up, waving me off like I’d said something rude. “I never wanted to give you that impression. There’s just… a certain type of person who I trust. I’m sure you can figure it out if you look at the crew.”

“People with nowhere to run? The cornered? The desperate? The kind of people who hit rock bottom?” I had already recognized the pattern. Aisling only seemed to pick up people like me. People who had nowhere to go. I had to wonder if everyone had joined the crew under similar circumstances to me. They probably didn’t have a choice either.

Aisling turned to me and gave me a look like I was stupid. “Survivors, Meryll.” She declared. “Yeah, I guess we all come from a desperate place, and from some real dark corners of the system at that. But there’s a billion people in the system like that. I bring on the spirited oppressed. People who’ve had everything against them and chose not to give up. I only had a hunch with you, but fuck, you fit right in. You got a megacorporation after you not for something you have, but for something you are. Something you can’t just give up or run away from. You’ve got a target the size of Luna on your back. And you got the balls to keep going anyway. Most people in your position? They’d lose their nerve and just give themselves up to those bastards, hope they’ll be merciful if you’re cooperative.” She scoffed. “Yeah, right.”

I nodded in agreement. Handing myself over wasn’t a choice. I suppose I was a survivor. I did what had to be done to keep moving. To stay free. “But why? Aren’t you afraid that someone’s going to… I dunno, turn on you, if they’re in that desperate of a position?” I flinched a little when I realized I was implying that I might have a position or a desire to flip on her if given an opportunity. I absolutely didn’t want to do that.

I was glad that she didn’t seem to take offense “Nah. I know people too well.” She spoke confidently, then flashed a surprisingly gentle smile my way. “To people like us, no amount of cash, no nebulous promise from some slimeball we don’t know, no cold institutional safety, will make us happy or make us feel secure. Won’t make us feel right. Not when we got real comrades. People who know what it’s like. People just as fucked up by this world. People you can trust. Might sound cheesy, but real friends you throw in with, whole heart, that’s the only thing that’s gonna give people like us comfort. And that’s what we got on Theseus. That’s the magic of this crew.”

I remembered in that moment how I’d refused to share my knowledge of the rest of the crew with Fuller when she asked. I didn’t distrust her, but I even made note of it back then: she’s not one of us. I guess I hadn’t seen that I already had that kind of loyalty with the others. Aisling was right, I couldn’t think of anything that would make me want to turn on these people who took me in at my darkest hour. They consoled me and helped me heal, and now I was one of them. I’d only known them for a month and a half or so by this point, but there was a connection there that I couldn’t deny. Something that I doubt I’d be able to find anywhere else, ever again. I don’t think I could even turn on the crew if I could somehow be returned to my comfortable false life. I guess adversity draws people like us together.

Aisling let out an amused huff “Don’t cry on me now, we got shit to do.”

I blinked a few times and noticed my eyes were starting to feel heavy. I quickly wiped a sleeve over them and took a deep breath “I-I’m okay.” I stammered out.

“Yeah, yeah. Save it for the shrink.” She chuckled.

“So… does that mean you were in our position once too? Desperate? A survivor?” I dared to ask. I knew nobody on Theseus was fond of speaking of their past, especially not Aisling, but I figured now was the best time to take my shot.

She let out a quiet, rumbling sigh, turning to face straight forward away from me “I trust you with our lives already, Meryll.” She started, “but I don’t know you well enough for that yet.”

I nodded slowly. I didn’t really understand, but I didn’t think it would be a good idea to push it. I had to respect the boundaries she could keep when I involuntarily invaded her privacy in so many other ways on a regular basis.

“But yeah. I was.” She mumbled anyway, quieting up again immediately after the words came out of her mouth. “I know your type cause I’ve been there. I’ll say that much.”

I nodded more enthusiastically this time. That was more than I expected to hear from her. It was reassuring that she could at least tell me that much. I didn’t push any further, and we walked the rest of the way to Dr. Yates’ office in respectful silence.

—

I sat down on the familiar couch in Dr. Yates’s office for what I knew would likely be the last time, my eyes closed as I tried to distract myself. I was trying to build a network bridge between here and the hangar so that I could peek in on Theseus, but I was having trouble finding enough stationary nodes to make a stable pathway there.

“Meryll?” Yates asked quietly, uncertain what I was doing. He had probably pieced together that I closed my eyes when I interacted with the psionic network, but he wasn’t technologically proficient enough to know what I was doing with it. “Are you there?”

I clicked my tongue and looked to the aged doctor, letting the fledgeling network fall apart. “Just worried about something. I’m worried about a lot of things right now.”

“Well, that’s why we’re here.” He smiled warmly at me, and I immediately felt myself calm. Whatever was going on through the backdoor dealings and impending violence across the colony right now, I had a future crisis to try to avert before I left the station and lost contact with this man for at least a month.

“I think I wanna focus on my amnesia problem today.” I said slowly. “What do I actually need to do to prevent myself from… I dunno, mentally falling apart when this time bomb goes off.”

“Well, it may not ‘go off’ at all.” Dr. Yates suggested. “You have been making this assumption that this crisis will break you when you remember it.”

“It broke thousands of other clones identical to me, Doc. I’m not stupid enough to think I’m that special.” I rolled my eyes. I was certainly a unique being in this system, but that didn’t make me invulnerable by any means. “I need something to work with that they didn’t.”

“I’d say that you already do. You have experience. You’ve had highs and lows in your real life, outside of that life simulation, yes?”

I shrugged “I’d say so. Yeah.” I immediately latched to the thought of feeling through Theseus, cutting through space like a bullet, twisting the engines on my command. The power behind a starship. That was the high. And the opposite of being limited to vulnerable flesh, at the whim of someone I don’t know or trust, a single frightening step away from the grim end of my spacefaring life as I know it, under Dr. Godin’s gaze.

“You have your own experiences to draw on, to cope with real problems you’ve had. Do you believe that your fears of facing what you know to have been a false memory really be as challenging?”

“I don’t know.” I mumbled. I wasn’t sure if it would be as simple as rationalizing it like that when the time came. The tragedy I couldn’t remember loomed over me, like a bomb with a fuse I couldn’t see the length of, ready to plunge me head first into madness, and I didn’t even have a metric for what it was going to feel like. Would it be as simple as recalling how ‘real’ it was in the moment and setting it aside like a story I read? Or would it consume me and override my rationality, permanently damaging my mind? I had no way of knowing just from speculation.

Was I really strong enough to just tough it out?

“I suppose not.” Yates admitted, taking on that sad, resigned expression of a man who knew that the world was messy and unpredictable. “This is, after all, ground that is rarely tread, under circumstances that have likely never happened before. But you have a very human mind, one that hasn’t been thrown into newfound sentience with only terrible stress clouding your mind. You’ve had time to armor yourself to reality.”

“So… you’re saying that I’m mentally stronger than those people who came before me just because I’ve had the chance to experience life?” I gave him a skeptical frown. He nodded back at me. I couldn’t accept that it was that simple. That felt too convenient. “I… don’t think that makes a lot of sense, doctor.” I sighed. “What if my experience doesn’t matter? When you’re in a sim, everything feels real, okay? It actually feels like you’re there, in the circumstances the program sets for you, and it takes effort to remember that it’s just a simulation.”

Except I’d been running hundreds of simulations, and I’d become accustomed to the emotional whiplash. I’d learned to shut it down and break the dissociation almost instantly by now.

I bit my lip, suddenly deep in thought. Was that the answer? Becoming so numb to simulations that I’d be able to pull myself through the memory with that same level of detachment I could bring to an imaginary battlefield? To reestablish my own ego when a program tried to hijack my thoughts and feed me false contexts?

Was that healthy when it applied to my memory?

I don’t know how long I’d been staring at the floor, but when I looked up, I saw Dr. Yates smiling warmly at me. He didn’t say anything, but I could see a certain smugness in his smile that he couldn’t help. He knew that I’d just had a revelation, but he wasn’t the type to brag.

“I can’t run away from this thing, but am I really supposed to just… stare it down? Confidently declare that I can beat it and just take charge of it? Like… try and brute force myself out of feeling bad when it happens?”

“Much of dealing with trauma does involve a degree of… stubbornness. Of facing your problems head on.” He spoke with quiet encouragement. He knew I was on the right track. “You have to make yourself believe that you are stronger than these problems. That you’re strong enough to…” he shook his head, as if the phrasing disagreed with him, “… win against them.”

I let out a quiet sigh “So I just have to do it. Be reckless. Dive headlong into my issues. That’s the answer I need? Just… be strong enough? Through my own willpower?”

Yates let out a quiet, but genuine laugh “Meryll, I have not known you for long, but I can tell that if there is anything you have plenty of, it is willpower. You’re quite strong-willed.”

Reflexively, I gave a doubtful sigh, but then I thought about it. I guess one could call my reckless bull-headedness a strong will, but I didn’t really have much confidence in it. Sure, in a moment of crisis, I could keep it together and act despite my fears, but I shouldn’t rely on that all the time. I couldn’t, right?

But I wasn’t talking about relying on it all the time. I was talking about relying on it at what could be my absolute worst, in the throes of my forgotten lowest moment.

I swallowed hard. Could I really rely on just being able to charge through this like I was smashing the hardest part of my ship into the weak point of an enemy hull, just hoping that a crazy gambit would pay off?

I took a deep breath. I suppose I would have to.

Without warning, the unmistakable register of a small caliber firearm cut through the silence that had punctuated my revelation, immediately followed by a second shot. Both Dr. Yates and I whipped our heads toward the front of his office, his face full of confusion, primal fear, and alarm as he stumbled to his feet.

“What?” Was all he managed. I stood up a moment later, taking a deep breath. I started to shake a little as the adrenaline built. I rushed toward the door while the doctor stammered, stepping back further into his office, clutching his tablet in fear “W-What are you doing?” He asked as I reached for the door handle.

I took a few more deep breaths to prepare myself and replied “Facing my problems, apparently,” before I pulled the door open to see Aisling leaning against the glass at the front of the office, peeking through the blinds.

On the floor lay none other than my tormentor, Dr. Godin, sprawled face down across the office floor with a single hole in his head bleeding profusely into the carpet, while a second unseen wound pooled crimson at his chest. He wasn’t breathing.

“They’re making their move.” Aisling muttered without looking at me, her pistol at the ready for the coming violence.